The Enemy Is a Bowl of Soup: On Quino’s 'Mafalda'

The cartoon character Mafalda, with her massive round head, sixties bob, triangular dress, and black Mary Janes, appears innocent. But this inquisitive girl-against-the-world is no ingenue—Mafalda often fires off sharp, incisive, and cynical observations about the political world around her. In Latin America, the comic strip named after her is legendary: although it ran for only nine years, from 1964 to 1973, this creation of the cartoonist Quino, the pen name of the illustrator Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón, captured how a society’s irony and humor survived one of Argentina’s darkest political chapters (a coup d’état initially led by Juan Carlos Onganía that took place between 1966 and 1970 and, later, Juan Domingo Perón’s third government, which oversaw the paramilitary anticommunist project that would set up the state for a dictatorship beginning in 1976